Conventionally proposed is a printing apparatus for effectively carrying out print processing such that an inexecutable (unprintable) print job is passed over and a waiting print job is processed (printed, executed) when processing a plurality of print jobs. What makes a print job inexecutable is a print source shortage such as a sheet shortage, or the like. Hereinafter, each print job is simply referred to as “job”.
Such a structure for passing over the inexecutable job and processing the waiting job is described in, e.g., Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publications 1 and 2 (hereinafter, respectively referred to as patent documents 1 and 2).
The structure disclosed in the patent document 1 judges, before printing (processing) a job, whether or not there are sheets required for the printing, and does not carry out the printing when there are no sheets. When judging that there are no sheets during the processing of the job, the structure stops the printing and processes a waiting job. When stopping the printing, the structure disclosed in the patent document 1 judges priority of the other (waiting) jobs, and carries out pass-over processing in accordance with the priority.
Meanwhile, the structure disclosed in the patent document 2 carries out printing such that: when error occurrence makes it impossible for ongoing printing to go on, a next job is processed. Further, when another error occurrence makes it impossible for the ongoing processing of the next job to go on, the structure processes a further next job. In other words, the structure disclosed in the patent document 2 suspends the printing, i.e., the processing of the job in response to the error occurrence, and processes an executable (printable, processible) waiting job.
[The Patent Document 1]
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication Tokukai 2003-131831 (published on May 9, 2003; corresponding to U.S. Patent Publication 2003/0076525A1)
[The Patent Document 2]
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication Tokukai 2004-1320 (published on Jan. 8, 2004)
However, in cases where the error such as the sheet shortage occurs upon the processing of the job and the error accordingly makes it impossible for the printing to go on, each of the conventional structures passes over (skips) the inexecutable job and processes a waiting job irrespective of nature of the inexecutable job. Specifically, the pass-over processing is carried out even in, e.g., the following cases (1) and (2): (1) a job coming before the inexecutable job, and the inexecutable job are correlated with each other, and the jobs need to be sequentially processed; and (2) the inexecutable job and a waiting job are one series, and a user wishes that the waiting job is processed after the inexecutable job.
More specifically, as a result of the pass-over processing carried out by the structure shown in the patent document 1, pass-over printing is carried out such that the jobs are processed in order from a job having the highest priority. In this case, the jobs are re-queued in accordance with the priority, and are processed in the order of the priority, even in cases where, e.g., there are a series of jobs correlated with the job suspended by the error. In other words, each of the correlated jobs cannot be processed just after the job suspended by the error.
On the other hand, the structure disclosed in the patent document 2 does not also take into account the correlation with the inexecutable job, and processes a mere executable one of the waiting jobs.
Namely, each of the conventional structures suffers from such a problem that: the pass-over processing is carried out even in cases where there are a plurality of jobs correlated with each other, with the result that an irrelevant job is processed between the correlated jobs.
Further, for attainment of effective pass-over processing in the structure disclosed in the patent document 1, the priority needs to be given to all the jobs. This requires the user to manually carry out such a bothersome priority giving.